Oxford Review of Education, Volume 36 Issue 4 2010

Oxford Review of Education, Volume 36 Issue 4 2010


The rise and fall of workplace basic skills programmes: lessons for policy and practice
Alison Wolf; Liam Aspin; Edmund Waite; Katerina Ananiadou
Pages 385 – 405
Since the publication of the Moser Report in 1999, improving the basic skills of adults has been a major priority for all of the UK's governments. There has been a particular interest in building up workplace provision, because of the assumed relationship between the basic skills of the employed population and productivity. A longitudinal study tracked 53 workplaces which hosted subsidised basic skills courses, and examined the impact on the enterprises themselves as well as on learners. It established that employers were not, contrary to policy-makers' expectations, concerned about employees' literacy levels, and supported provision largely as a way of providing general development opportunities. Learners, who made small literacy gains at best, did not change their behaviour in ways which were likely to affect productivity. Once subsidies ended, employers were unwilling to support further provision at full cost. This provides further evidence that basic skills tuition does not have an immediate impact on performance. Overall the subsidised programmes used an extremely costly approach, and left no lasting legacy. The findings have major implications for the organisation of effective educational provision for less-skilled employees and suggest that the current approach to subsidising workplace training is seriously defective.

The Culture Project: diasporic negotiations of ethnicity, identity and culture among teachers, pupils and parents in Chinese language schools
Louise Archer; Becky Francis; Ada Mau
Pages 407 – 426
Notions of culture, ethnicity and identity are highly political (and also personally meaningful) issues within diasporic communities. Complementary schools are particularly interesting sites in this respect, as they are often set up with an explicit cultural agenda of 'preserving' or 'maintaining' 'traditional' culture and language within diasporic communities. In this paper, we draw on qualitative data from an ESRC funded study conducted in six Chinese complementary schools to consider how pupils (n=60), parents (n=24) and teachers (n=21) in these schools construct and negotiate issues of culture and identity. We consider the ways in which the cultural agenda of the schools is constructed and experienced, teasing out the ways in which cultural discourses and pupil identities are deployed (and resisted, reworked) within the space of Chinese schools. Finally we consider the extent to which the schools are perceived by the young people to be 'successful' (or not) in their efforts to make pupils feel 'more Chinese'.

Cultural reductionism and the media: polarising discourses around schools, violence and masculinity in an age of terror
Martin Mills; Amanda Keddie
Pages 427 – 444
This paper provides a media analysis of three interrelated sets of newspaper articles dealing with youth, schooling and violence. Understanding the media as a dominant and powerful cultural text that creates the realities it describes, the paper takes a critical view of the 'standpoint' of recent media representations of the Cronulla (Sydney, Australia) riots, gang violence in schools, and issues of education amid broader concerns with security in an 'age of terror'. The paper draws attention to the polarising media discourses that demonise young Muslim men as the 'other'—violent and dangerous—and advocate for 'ethnic' integration of this 'other' over 'progressive education' or 'multiculturalism'. Such reductionist sociology is presented as highly problematic in its homogenising and inferiorising of minority cultures and in its silencing of particular issues imperative in understanding and addressing contemporary expressions of violence. The paper calls for a more nuanced interpretation of issues of culture and violence that, in particular, acknowledges how masculinity politics are implicated in current manifestations of violence.

Maternal schooling and children’s relative inequalities in developmental outcomes: evidence from the 1947 school leaving age reform in Britain
Ricardo Sabates; Kathryn Duckworth
Pages 445 – 461
This paper investigates whether mothers' participation in post-compulsory education impacts on children's relative inequalities across four developmental outcomes. The empirical analysis uses information from children born in 1958 in Britain. Mothers of the 1958 British cohort were affected by the 1947 school leaving age reform, which increased the age of compulsory schooling from 14 to 15 years. We selected the first-born cohort members whose mothers were born in 1933 and 1934 and whose mothers completed compulsory schooling only. We found that the additional year of maternal schooling was significantly associated with relative improvements in mathematics attainment for their children, but no significant differences for reading or behavioural outcomes. The impact on mathematics was mainly for boys. These results suggest wider dispersion in mathematics attainment between sons whose mothers benefited from the additional year of schooling in 1947 and those whose mothers did not.

The creation and maintenance of a ‘learning-loving minority’ in conventional high schools: a research-based response to John Ogbu
Eugene Matusov; Renée DePalma; Mark Philip Smith
Pages 463 – 480
This research focuses on the adaptation strategies of students from an innovative elementary school run as a community of learners who have been involuntarily 'thrown into' competitive, credentialism-based high schools. We apply the anthropologist John Ogbu's comparative historico-ecological framework of 'minority' to the innovative school graduates in their new school contexts. The students in our study, whom we refer to as a 'learning-loving minority', were generally academically successful in their new conventional schools, yet expressed distinctly ambivalent attitudes toward conventional schooling practices. Discourse analysis revealed distinct response patterns, some paralleling those of (unsuccessful) involuntary minority students and others paralleling those of (successful) immigrant minority students described by Ogbu. We suggest that Ogbu's comparative historico-ecological approach can be useful for education research but should be modified to take into account the effect of the institution of conventional schooling itself—its competitive, credentialistic and meritocratic nature—which has to date been under-analysed within Ogbu's theoretical perspective

Funding and the attainment of transformation goals in South Africa’s higher education
Gerald Wangenge-Ouma
Pages 481 – 497
The link between the funding of higher education and the attainment of higher education transformation goals in South Africa, especially access by students from previously under-represented communities, is the main focus of this paper. Specifically, the paper examines three questions: (a) How does public funding of higher education encourage (or discourage) the attainment of higher education transformation goals in South Africa? (b) What challenges do frequent tuition fee increases pose to the attainment of higher education transformation goals? (c) How can South Africa's higher education be made affordable for indigent (mostly black) students? The paper concludes that although South Africa's higher education funding formula is generally geared towards attaining the goals of transformation, several of its aspects are inimical to the achievement of these goals. Further, declining public funding of higher education and frequent tuition fee increases by public universities vis--vis higher education's natural inclination to reproduce, and even to exacerbate, existing social disparities and inequalities do not bode well for the attainment of transformation in South Africa's higher education. This is aggravated by existing high levels of poverty and inequality mostly affecting the majority of the communities that were marginalised during apartheid.

Tooley, Dixon and Gomathi on private education in Hyderabad: a reply
Padma M. Sarangapani; Christopher Winch
Pages 499 – 515
Tooley, Dixon and Gomathi maintain that private unrecognised unaided schools in Hyderabad, India, catering for children of the poor, provide a better level of education than do their government counterparts. We examine this contention and argue first that Tooley et al.'s conceptualisation of education and its benefits is flawed and second that the evidence selected and provided to prove the empirical side of the case is one-sided and unrepresentative. We conclude that their case remains unproven and that flaws in the argument and its evidence provide no substantial case for their contention

A rejoinder to Sarangapani and Winch
James Tooley; Pauline Dixon; S. V. Gomathi
Pages 517 – 520